How Things Work, part one

How Things Work

Thanks to a lucky set of chance occurrences yesterday, I can finally explain my working method in this LiveJournal and why it has led to some of my more debatable conclusions.

Nobody will want to follow me on this, but if I don’t write this down now, I’ll never do it. It is also a review of the new edition (with a preface by Michael Chabon) of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art and a more serious summation of the book that utopyr and I were having such fun with yesterday, Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor’s Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity.

If that didn’t convince you not to click on the asterisk denoting the LJ-cut, you are incorrigible and you deserve the tedious stuff that lies in wait. ( * )

How Things Work, part two

I have referred often to the influence on me of Richard A. Underwood’s 1966 essay “Hermes and Hermeneutics,” in which he praises depth psychology as a solution to the crisis of meaning (Nietzsche’s “death of God”), but also praises the values of ambiguity and craftiness combined with deep seriousness in the practice of interpretation, hermeneutics as derived from the myth of its patron god Hermes. ( click! )

How Things Work, part three

The monks who were hauled off by the Czar's marines for disturbing the peace in 1913 were under the Czar's jurisdiction because the monasteries of Mount Athos were under jurisdictional transition. The Ottoman Empire had given the monasteries a type of autonomy that allowed them, after the Greek Navy chucked out the Ottoman authorities in 1912, to demand that the Greek Government give them leave them to organize as a sovereign republic; the twenty monasteries, however, represented the monks of more than one Orthodox nation (each Orthodox Church is a national entity under a multinational patriarchate); the respective nations had been propping up their state churches' overseas monasteries economically, creating an ambiguous political situation that remained fluid in the wake of the First Balkan War.

Today, Greece considers Mount Athos a self-governing monastic state under the protection of the Hellenic Republic. In 2010, someone decided there was revenue to be raised by allowing the self-governing monastic state to organize its own postal service and thus print its own stamps:



So Mount Athos is another one of those productively anomalous political entities that I love, neither here nor there in a secular as well as a spiritual sense, as far on the margin as you can get without dropping off the earth altogether. But in 1913 it was a point of contention for a Russian imperial state that considered the State Church its particular bailiwick and the overseas monastery a valuable piece of real estate on the Mediterranean to be kept under Russian governmental protection, to the point of sending in the marines to maintain order if the need arose.

Just one more collision between the literal-minded forces of order and the disruptive (though in this case humorless) interrupters of the established tranquility. We have seen how the literal-mindedness of the disturbers of the establishment's differently conceived literal-mindedness still gave rise to imaginative leaps in the minds of mathematicians.

And this also is how things work.